[ggreer]

If by "consistent" you mean "looks like garbage on some platforms", then yes, it's possible: https://medium.com/@ValidScience/two-mysterious-web-font-bug...

Web font bugs show up in the weirdest places. Unless you're constantly vigilant and manually test across all the platforms you want to support, some users will see crappy fonts. Hardly anybody goes looking for these bugs, so the bad fonts can be shipped in production for years without anybody at the company noticing. This is what has happened at Apple, Wired, and Medium.

Not that consistency is worth striving for. There's not much consistent about what you can show on both a 6" 4K OLED and a 15" 1366x768 TFT LCD. Certain fonts will look great on the former and be borderline-unreadable on the latter.

[baddox]

The first one is, just like it says, a bug, and apparently a bug that Apple fixed on their website. The second one is Wired using a terrible web font. Neither the possibility of having fixable bugs nor the option of choosing a terrible font strike me as particularly strong arguments against web fonts. You are already free to use system fonts at terrible sizes or contrast ratios, and many sites definitely do that.

[Solar19]

I'm the author of that Medium article. The "second one" you referred to isn't the second bug I reported – it's just an aside on Wired's crazy headline font. They've since replaced it with a normal readable font...